Our group is interested in examining gender roles in online communication.
We will study the differences between communication between same-sex
pairs and opposite-sex pairs, and between male and female language use.
Hypothesis: The occurrence of idioms specific to computer mediated
communication in CMC settings is correlated with the gender of the
communication participants and the 'seriousness' of the topic of
conversation.
We are researching the different use of Language between men and women
when using the computer as the communication medium. We feel that people
tend to deviate in their language use when interacting with others via the
internet. For example, when people speak with friends and peers over the
internet, there tends to be more grammatical errors and increased use of
"Internet-isms", such as emoticons and abbreviations, in the message.
Through getting a group of people to interact via a chat room or through
AIM, we will try to understand if our hypothesis holds and what factors
will affect it. Similarly, we will be analyzing how gender affects the
type of language use over the internet. In order to get unbiased results,
we will pick a specific topic and have our participants engage in online
discourse. This will help us understand if gender is analogous to specific
types of language use. Also, to reaffirm our hypothesis, we will use two
discussion topics to see if the seriousness of a discussion alters the
amount of internet-isms used and if it deviates between genders.
Danny Duran
Henry Mason
Sarah Perkins
Greg Vixama
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Influence of Gender and Topic on Language
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3 comments:
Nice job. You certainly seem to have a solid idea of what you want to do and where you want to go with it. The way I understand it is that you are looking at a 2x2 experimental design: 2 subject classes (male and female) in two conditions (serious topic and not-so-serious topic), and will measure language use in each condition (grammar/spelling errors, idioms, emoticons, etc) to see if there is any noticeable difference. While you proposed to study this in a chat room, I think it might actually be easier to look at with simple dyadic groups. To really see if there is a difference in language use you could use a confederate as one of the partners. By keeping the confederate the same through each run of the experiment you can control for any influence that communication partners might have on the use of language in CMC. If you wanted to take it even a step further, you could have each participant converse with two confederates, one male and one female, to really control for any effect communication partners may have on language use. Overall, I really like your idea.
I’ll certainly be interested in hearing how your study turns out.
First of all, I like the creation of the word internetisms. It is very appropriate and something that would definitely be an interesting study topic. My only concern in your research plan is that you are examining same-sex and opposite-sex pairs and also serious versus non-serious topics. Depending on how the experiment is arranged this could require a great deal of participants. I think the study would be better served if you were to examine only the same-sex and opposite-sex pairs as that variable is clearly defined. The seriousness of a topic is a little more difficult to quantitatively gauge. Sounds like a cool idea though.
Analyzing gender bias within a conversation the way you are will definitely lead you to some hard facts on the difference between genders in a communication medium. I would bet you will find males are more direct while females are likely more flowery with their conversation. My main concern so far would be how you are going to quantify your result. You could count the amount of grammatical errors, emoticons and abbreviations but this might prove a bit cumbersome. Another thing to look at besides observational criteria you listed would be to analyze the amount of track 1 and track 2 signals occurring in the conversation. This might add even more depth to the criteria you are already using. Overall I think you have a good start. This will likely be an easy experiment to set up and once you have the results, it will be easy to come up with a good conclusion as to why.
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